Thursday, July 23, 2009

What to Wear to the Beach

Sometimes it's hard to point out the subtle cultural differences between the U.S. and Latvia without seeming insensitive. But try we must. And in this spirit, we present this picture of what two young women chose to wear to the beach in Jurmala one day not long ago. The short green overcoat actually covers a quite small denim dress. And by the time we captured this picture of her on the beach, she had taken off the precipitously high-heeled shoes she was wearing. Beach-goers wear swimsuits of varying degrees of skimpiness in both the U.S. and Latvia. But in general, Americans go to the beach to relax. Shorts and a t-shirt would be seen as pretty typical. The residents of Latvia go to the beach to be seen, which means tiger-striped mini-dresses and towering high heels and tiny dogs in outfits designed to match their owner's outfit. I'm not going to lie and say that the ladies pictured above were not quite attractive in their own way, but the fancy clothing that people wear to beaches, which I think most Americans consider pretty filthy places, boggles the mind.

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Guatemala? Rio de Janeiro? Huh?

This journal once chronicled the experience of a low-level American diplomat living in Guatemala. Then he went to Latvia, and Afghanistan, and then back "home" to Washington, DC for a bit. He is now serving in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. If you are one of the few people of no blood relation to the authors who has come here in search of Guatemalan content, here are a few choices from the archives that we like:

In Afghanistan, the photographic opportunities were often limited to what we could sneak with a point-and-shoot camera out the bulletproof window of a speeding SUV. But sometimes we got out and about. A few favorites from that tour:

We've also vacationed aggressively in each region we've been posted in, and taken some epic home leave trips, usually leading to better photos than those where we were posted. Those photos are included in the blog, but somehow holiday snaps seem beneath this sidebar.